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Comment by plaidfuji | Hacker News Reader

1000% agree with this post, wow. I can’t believe this is controversial.. it’s a disaster. I dread opening the mobile version of google docs, sheets, or even Notes for anything more than a grocery list.

The problem is the target audience for this is business customers, and particularly those in management, so it’s a small market. ICs aren’t up and down as much between meetings and can largely stick to their desktop setup. But the manager’s life is one of constant movement, reviewing and making comments on things, drafting, editing, tweaking, etc… and usually in blocks of time where it doesn’t quite make sense to sit all the way down (unless you’re really good at calendar management, which.. also sucks on mobile!)

> fixing text editing isn’t seen as important enough in the war between Android and iOS.

I think there’s a group of people for whom this would make all the difference. It’s just not your typical consumer.

EDIT: and before you say “sounds like you just want a tablet” - I don’t! A tablet is the difference between lugging around a briefcase with me everywhere, or not.

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> It’s just not your typical consumer.

My only disagreement. I think many people don't know they want something better because they've never used something better. The video in the link describes how the users do short texts to get around the problem [0], including deleting whole blocks of text instead of editing. Teenagers, parents, and many others communicate heavily through texts and are often "up and down" like management/business users. On the whole I believe many people would benefit from a better text editing experience.

[0]: https://programs.sigchi.org/uist/2021/program/content/61484

I miss my Blackberry for typing.

The tactile feedback of real keys was so much better than haptic screens.

Yes, a big part of the problem is that so so many words need editing.

I updated to ios17 excited about the new transformer model, and it still predicts absolute BS words I’ve never used in my life.

I definitely remember typing working better on my iPhone 5 which was 20% smaller so I don’t know what’s gone wrong, but it’s gone really wrong and the fixes also suck.

I had the first SE, and it initially handled mixed language text correction phenomenally, but went downhill with each update, which was really puzzling

The way cursor movement by touch was implemented on BB10 Wwas also the best I've ever used on mobile. Some kind of adaptive zoom and tap to move by one position.

Remember T9? I haven't much experience with it—I'm young. But it was a much more pleasant experience than the current experience with touch screen. Swiping works, but I feel it requires too much cognitive energy. As soon as a conversation is taking longer than this paragraph, I tend to call the person instead.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

I got downvoted a lot when I mentioned missing T9 previously.

It could be nostalgia, but I was pretty quick and generally accurate sending short messages.

Not sure I would want to type a document on T9.

Agreed I remember being faster than my friends who preferred the “abc” mode. Not sure if all phones did this but my phones would sort the words by frequency of use for each combination of button presses so T9 kept getting faster the more I used it.

I tried t9 when I in the name of simplicity went for a Nokia candy bar. It was utter shit. I think it only worked because there was no good alternatives back then.

T9 was so terrible I didn't use text messaging until I got my first iPhone.

Actual Keyboard >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Touch screen typing >>>>>>> T9

T9 was terrible for you.

You could literally type the message without taking the phone out of the pocket because it was extremely predictable and you knew the menu structure by the gut.

Agreed, I would routinely text without looking. I do now too, with SwiftKey, but it's much less deterministic.

It's more like T9 wasn't terrible for you. There's a good reason it died off. Touch screen keyboards are better for 99% of the population.

Sounds like a small, niche but very real market and product: A keyboard case with Bluetooth (but security!) or USB-C.

Bonus points for e-ink-based keys.

Edit: Realistically I’d be surprised if something like this doesn’t already exist.

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/bbq20-keyboard-with-track...

What about an updated BlackBerry Torch 9800?

That looks pretty cool, and others must’ve thought that as well because it’s sold out.

Some of the immediate things that came to mind were making a case that integrates the phone with the keyboard; and a small battery to extend the life of the phone since the keyboard adds to the formfactor anyway.

Bonus points if this creates a market for a small phone again (iphone 12 user here).

I agree although I have never used a Blackberry. I have used a dozen of smart phone models in the early 2000s, either with physical keyboards or resistive touch. And then the iphone came and everybody moved to capacitive touch. It might have some advantages, but precise working is not one of them. I still hate it 15 years later what shitty products we have to use despite of all engineering efforts buried in them.

This is why I own a Titan Pocket. Physical keyboards are simply superior.

For me it's the original Motorola Droid and Droid 2. The slide-out keyboards have been the best mobile text editing experience I've had.

This. Ever since I lost the physical keyboard of the blackberry, I have had to accept to live with a significant and constant productivity hit when it comes to writing more than a couple of words on my touchscreen phones with the need to avoid typing errors. I failed to master the act of writing on a cellphone, contrary to typing on a physical keyboard.

I have seen people type blazingly fast on touchscreen phones though, albeit I didn't run error stats on their output. I accept that I may lack some skills needed to become better at this, but seeing others highlighting that this is a problem to them is not surprising to me, based on anecdotal evidence.

E.g., I knew someone who added to his email signature a permanent apology for typing errors giving the justification that he was typing on a touchscreen device.

All in all, I agree that the problem is real, and havging had experience with a working solution (physical keyboard) I wonder why there appears to be no business case today for such devices.

It’s funny, as I was writing this comment I thought, “it’s almost like they need to make a blackberry for the smartphone era - oh wait…”

I desperately miss my HTC touch Pro two and its slider keyboard. It was a dream.

I want a modern touch pro from Google - slider keyboard, no bloatware or Samsung apps, nice big battery and modern screen, one nice camera, proper landscape support all over, and 5 years of updates.

I don't need 15 cameras or ai anything. Heck make it a battery + keyboard case that goes on to a pixel and does a decent typing job and I'd buy it.

The more experience I get in the working world, the more I realize that the hardest problem is finding people that see there is a problem.

> before you say “sounds like you just want a tablet”

One of my friends uses a GPD Pocket 3, which is an 8-inch computer that's small enough to fit in your pocket, with a full keyboard, touchpad, and touchscreen that swivels to become a tablet. It's pretty nifty. https://gpd.hk/gpdpocket3

I'd say purchase a folding phone. It's great.

It doesn't address this editing issue at all. It somewhat attempts to address multi-tasking, but this thread is specifically about how poor the text editing experience is, and I'd like to hear how a folding phone fixes that?

I have an iPad and even there without a mouse plugged in, the editing experience is poor.

You're correct. It isn't a direct solution. For the most part, it makes the selection experience easier, which then makes the editing experience easier.

But I wouldn't underestimate how big a difference it is. One difference between a folding phone and an iPad, is that I can reach every part of my screen with my thumbs still in their resting position. It feels a lot more ergonomic to have an 8 inch 4:3 screen than a larger 16:10 screen that requires hands gymnastics to touch type.

Hold to select word. Drag to extend selection. Drag pops up the edit menu by default, which takes little screen real estate and zero additional clicks to do a cut/copy. Lastly, a cut/copy automatically puts the snippet as the top recommendation on my auto complete bar on the keyboard. So paste doesn't need triggering the edit menu again.

Samsung doesn't have a double tap experience. So it removes that ambiguity.

I have the stubbiest fingers I know and I type a lot ; as my HN profile bears witness. So I have heavily user-tested this experience that I claim to love so much.

Shocker! touch is not the best at complex and precise input. But it’s great for general purpose use and buttons. Problem is we all at some point in our day, week, month need to do something complex on the touch device, which becomes a challenging task and experience.

The new iPhone is 6.7 inches so nearly there?

Although they used the 'Pocket' brand for the Pocket 3, it is really a GPD MicroPC 2. The original MicroPC was 6 inches and is an even better candidate for "phone sized laptop". The crazy thing is that it's perfectly usable and much more productive than a phone - if it could make phone calls and had the same sensor suite as a smartphone, it would be superior along every axis.

Oh wow! I remember the 1st and 2nd Gen.! The 3rd one is so nice! I don’t need one any soon, but it looks like I’d love to have one later in the future. I’m very curious what would the next gens look like.

I found even better laptop, if you don’t need any extra slots (most of the time I don’t):

GPD P2 Max 2022. The world's smallest Ultrabook: https://gpd.hk/gpdp2max2022

As a bit of a GPD fanboi I have both a pocket 2 and a pocket max. When I was a server admin, pocket 2 went everywhere with me in a pelican case. That was just this side of too bulky to carry without noticing.

Pocket max in the pelican was just on the other side of that threshold.

The benefit of the pocket 2 is the full windows/linux installation alongside the usable qwerty keyboard.

I don’t think screen size is the limiting factor when editing, but the lack of a convenient keyboard. I’ve edited quite large texts with a Bluetooth keyboard connected to my phone. Currently have a Nuphy air 75 and keychron k15 pro, small sized, mechanical, ergonomic Bluetooth keyboards, both make editing pretty acceptable.

To be honest, I haven’t even been able to make a tablet really work for me as a serious laptop replacement for any halfway serious office productivity work. Except for a very short trip I bring a laptop because otherwise I’ll run into something I have trouble doing that I need to do.

True, but i feel the same way about laptops. For true productivity i need at least one big display, so will usually dock it with an external display, keyboard and mouse. Funny thing is that the modern iPads connected to an external display gives more or less the same experience as a laptop (as long as you're not programming...)

I have a multi-display desktop. I accept I’m not going to have full capabilities if I’m not at home. For travel an external display on an iPad is a nonstarter.

But then you need a table or some sort of surface to put the keyboard on, and then I might as well use my laptop if I have it. I want better editing for when I'm standing in line at the grocery store with one hand free.

I have a keyboard that I've attached a guitar strap to, in order to be able to type while standing, without a table to rest the keyboard on.

You reinvented...the keytar.

I miss the Sidekick, myself. Was the perfect device for writing while standing. Physical keyboard and a big-ish screen, with the form of a modern smartphone.

The swivel design made finding a decent case tough though. And there were few apps.

Which was an influence on the first Android device, the HTC Dream. Swivel keyboard AND a trackball. It was pretty cool but unfortunately didn't catch on.

I love the concept... but in that price range, I'm no longer comfortable just carrying it around with me, which partially negates the reason for getting it.

Given the (really cool) KVM module with HDMI input and USB keyboard/mouse output, it really feels like an enterprise datacenter product.

Sadly, the .hk kills it. I can't even look at the page, my corp network geoip blocks China's IP addresses completely.

Corp would never let a Chinese created device on network.

I generally agree and also disagree with a few aspects of both your comment and the OP.

First of all, to the OP, maybe not for the leet kids, but I absolutely find large amounts of text input on a phone to be a pain. I can do it if I’m away from a computer and have to, but I don’t enjoy it and it takes more time and requires a lot of concentration.

As for cursor positioning, holding down the space bar on iOS works pretty well—although it took me a few years to learn about it.

I do think text editing could always be better and I actually think it’s a pretty broad use case. I’m also not convinced mobile is easily adapted to it, especially without really good text input [probably speech] which also isn’t suitable in a lot of situations.

> As for cursor positioning, holding down the space bar on iOS works pretty well — although it took me a few years to learn about it.

I did not know this and it’s a godsend. I have otherwise found iOS cursor positioning to be awful, especially when text selection is involved as well. Thank you.

Most operating systems have a lot of really useful shortcuts that most people don't use despite it potentially making their lives 10x easier like Ctrl/Cmd+C. Swipe to undo, holding down the key to access accented keys (also works on address bars as it prompts you to add common domains like .com or .net), slide to type, etc. An easy way to discover most of these (on iOS specifically) is just to go through the working with text section in the iOS Tips app.

Maybe I’m a leet kid but I type 65 WPM on my phone so I find actual typing on my phone on par with typing on desktop, except if special punctuation is involved.

…but the whole mobile experience is still terrible with a lot of scrolling, panning, and annoying text selection.

I’m aware most people don’t type that fast so they would never type on mobile but for those that do, it would be sweet if the mobile experience was better.

One thing I found out on iOS recently is that you can shake your phone for text undo.

I’m probably more like 20 with a much higher error rate than on my laptop. And more focus required.

Wouldn't typing on a touchscreen for long periods cause RSI much faster than a keyboard in the long term?

(because of the body positioning - back, neck - and the hard surface)

(not arguing against improving typing on mobile, obviously)

Wouldn’t be surprised.

Truthfully I’m most worried about the thumbs. I feel like they can ache if I’ve been doomscrolling for hours

Holy cow, you just improved my life! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRUCnZFv9Ro

When I somehow inadvertently found out about this a few years back, I was “How could I not know this?”

Holding down spacebar and swiping side to side changes keyboard language for me. Have to hold stationary for quite a bit longer before it becomes a cursor mover.

> As for cursor positioning, holding down the space bar on iOS works pretty well—although it took me a few years to learn about it.

It’s great until you need to move the cursor downward. Being completely undiscoverable doesn’t help.

Maybe we need something like the old thinkpad nub on touchscreen keyboards.

It’s great until you need to move the cursor downward.

Actually I just discovered the spacebar trick thanks to the parent comment and... I can move up and down in a block of text by using the same method.

Maybe I don't understand what you mean?

You can move the cursor up maybe 10 lines from where you start before going off the edge of the keyboard.

Now try moving down 10 lines from where you start. Hopefully you will see the issue with starting from the spacebar at the bottom edge of the screen.

Ah ok, thanks - I experimented with a iPhone note and did not go very far, actually.

I have been using this sine iphone 6/3d touch era and it is ok, but has gotten worse.

1. The space bar is a much smaller target than the original whole keyboard and I often find myself needing multiple press drags.

2. Something changed recently and it is harder to hit your placement target in text especially in single line inputs. When this happens your cursor ends up back where it was or at the start of the line. It is particularly difficult to edit or select a url in the safari menu bar.

Note: I used the space bar cursor placement at least 5 times writing this. It would have been much more difficult without.

The moment I opened the article and started reading an idea came to me before reaching the authors solution. Imagine if you could just double tap a word and suddenly it becomes focused and enlargened while slightly blurring the rest of the text. The word in question now has easily targetable tap targets that you can modify quickly, swipe up to delete, rearrange, select etc like a sliding puzzle game. Like everyone I've had the same problem but in a majority of the cases its to fix something that the phone suggested or accidentally added to the directory that I can't easily remove (thanks ios) and nothing overly complex.

A lot of the problem (for me at least) is that phone text-selection UIs are way too stateful. It’s very easy to mistime a tap and get a word select instead of selecting a different spot. It’s also very easy to misposition a tap and select too much, or not enough.

Adding text-selection features is IMO not the best approach. I’d actually rather they reduced the feature set and made the effects of UI actions less dependent on the state of the text selection UI.

An especially sucky part of editing text is changing tense or plurality. Changing "run" or "ran" or "running" is a exercise in frustration because the editor could easily change it for you by reading what you're typing.

Eg I have "bottles are falling" typed out, but I go back and edit it to say "bottle are falling", and then the editor offers to update "are" to "is" for me.

Swype keyboard used to have this feature built in. Put the cursor on a word, any word (made earlier by swype's edit keyboard, which had cursor controls), and tap the Swype key. You'd be presented with a list of alternates/stems, with the current word as the root. At minimum you got simple plurals

Gboard has a similar edit keyboard, although I find it's a tad harder to get to than Swype's

> I dread opening the mobile version of google docs, sheets, or even Notes for anything more than a grocery list.

I dread it even for grocery lists. For one the apps (Notion, Google Docs, you name it) all give me a stupid splash screen when I tap them, and I have to wait 5-10 seconds to see content. We're in 2023. Splash screens should be unnecessary. Opening a piece of text should take no more than 50ms after the tap on the app icon.

About half the grocery stores I frequent have no cell phone signal. Why the HELL can't a device in 2023, with all the machine learning we have today, deduce from my GPS track and time/day deduce that I'm probably headed to one of several grocery stores, record that the last time said grocery store had no signal, and pre-download anything that looks like a grocery list, or hell, labelled explicitly as one? And do whatever rendering it needs off screen so that it's no more than 25ms from tapping the app icon to viewing it? It has a GHz+ processor, 90Hz screen, 25ms isn't a tall ask to render some text. 5-10 seconds? What are engineers busy doing?

And this is why I still use post-its for grocery lists.

I have an online text editor open in the browser, and use that (i use editpad.org, but there are many others).

I like AnyList for this. Keeps the groceries synced to your phone, sticks things in relatively sane categories, is fairly customizable, supports multiple real time editors (so my wife and I can both check stuff off as we add it around the store), has a web interface, and until Google decided to ruin it, had a nice smart speaker integration

We've had this device for many years, you're just using bloated apps

Just tested Simplenote on a very old phone, reopens immediately in the list and I can type/check mark items right away (though first open takes longer) Apple notes is also snappy

I don’t understand why a tablet requires lugging a briefcase around? Just carry it raw between meetings and put it down if you need two hands for something. If you already carry papers around, get a folding keyboard case. Maybe we’re just thinking of different working environments and I’m imagining an office whereas you’re imagining a job site or something.

The actual reason that a tablet isn’t the answer is that the Google docs app for iPads is incredibly bad (I’ve had one second per letter max typing speeds with it, though thankfully it buffered my key presses). And then the solution kinda sucks because you would want a light laptop (eg MacBook Air or windows equivalent) but closing the lid will add too large a delay so you’ll need to carry it around half-open, which isn’t great but also isn’t lugging around a briefcase.

> I don’t understand why a tablet requires lugging a briefcase around? Just carry it raw between meetings and put it down if you need two hands for something.

Being forced to carry the tablet every time you're moving during a work day is annoying. The big issue is not moving between meetings, it's every other movement during the day. For example getting lunch or getting to the office (especially on e.g. the subway or bike).

Ah ok, I was imagining keeping it in the office.

I used Acer Iconia W4-821, a 8" tablet on Win8 for some time.

It was great for my use case, to tinker with PwSh/CentOS VM while commuting or ocassional meetings as a notetaking app. Sadly it wasn't the device even I (a big, tall guy with big hands) could haul around with ease. It really wanted some sort of case/minibag or whatever. It was perfectly fine with a backpack or a messenger bag, but how often do you see people with a messenger bag in the office or meeting?

EDIT: the best case for it would had been some sort of a pistol holster or a leg tacticool holster... even I would mutter 'Nerd' on sight of this.

> business customers, and particularly those in management, so it’s a small market

Is it really that small? It sounds like a massive market to me.

It's substantial both in size (total people) and in impact and economic impact.

not in constrast with basically the entire planet (the overall market for smartphones)

It’s literally the market that created the BlackBerry, one of the most influential devices of the last 20 years, so yeah it’s a big group.

and yet blackberry went away…

I mean, yeah — because it was replaced by the iPhone. Not because that market shrank or was otherwise invalidated.

I think the target market is huge. My wife, for example, spends tons of time writing out stuff for Instagram posts, some quite long. And I see tons more across social media that is largely done on people's phones.

This is what folding phones are great for. The extra space is great for multitasking, reading spreadsheets, viewing calendars, reading documents, etc.

They don't really help with writing or editing text, unless you have big hands and need a larger keyboard. Most of the difficulty with text editing are related to the cursor, as the article points out, and a bigger screen doesn't really help. I suppose the extra real estate can be used for a docked or floating menu.

As long as we're looking at hardware that isn't a glass rectangle, the Blackberry was pretty great for text input. So sad hardware keyboards died off.

I consider my phone devices mostly read only. I do have an iPad and text editing is better, but still there are still stumbling blocks. Entering text is pretty easy, and making large scale cut/copy/paste edits is OK. It's the smaller edits, adding or changing punctuation, fixing typos, transposing words, or changing small words (‘the’ to ‘a’, for example), where I find difficulty with the behavior of the selection function.

The audience might be bigger than we're inclined to think. For a lot of the next generation, mobile is by far their main computer.

Yeah, the bizarrely apologetic tone of this article was a real turn off. I don’t think any reasonable person would classify text editing on mobile as anything less than needing a full overhaul. Also, whose feelings are we sparing here by being apologetic for criticizing it?

To me the article reads as if it was originally targeted at his colleagues at google who told him they weren't going to implement his ideas.

Surprised it didn't mention the lack of a "Delete" key (at least in the standard Android keyboard). All that is provided is Backspace. On the desktop, I use Delete and Backspace equally, depending on where my cursor happens to be.

Can't speak for everyone but it took me a decade of computer usage to even "fit" the delete key in my text editing workflow and getting used to reaching for it. I still don't use it much, and it doesn't help that it's hard to reach on laptops and not simply shift+backspace. I think of the delete key as a power-user feature.

You may have grown up with a Mac if you think the delete key is a key for a power user :)

Hard to reach keys can be rebound too easy to reach, eg you can have

right alt + h to backspace right alt + g to delete

This is honestly why I carry my GPD MicroPC with me now, as its almost as portable as the phone, and unfathomably easier to do things like draft emails, do text editing and other basics, than my phone is.

that has to look hilarious in the grocery store, I just have to say

I need to get a replacement battery for mine after it drained too deeply and no longer will charge :( They didn't push out some kind of fix for that, did they?

Are folding phones a solution for managers?

Folding phones are much easier to type on, but not close to a real keyboard.

If they're a clamshell style with a physical keyboard, as with the Psion Series 5, possibly:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5>

Folding-screen phones are an expensive gimmick, with inevitable exceedingly expensive repairs:

<https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/the-pixel-folds-scre...>

I predict a flop along the lines of 3DTV.

This is where speech to text models like Whisper and LLMs can make a real difference.

No -- those are for typing. This is about editing. Totally different things.

Just to be clear, the problem here isn’t entering text, but with editing it. With better keyboards, voice transcription, and physical keyboards on many tablets, getting text into a device is not the problem it used to be. However, you will always want to edit your words afterwards.

From TFA.

“Rewrite this sentence to be more concise”

I personally don’t like speech-to-text because then you’re broadcasting every word you write to everyone around you.

It might be better with a specially-trained model that uses stenographer-style compression that only you know, so drive-by eavesdroppers can’t translate your text entry on the fly.

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